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Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Empowerment, not slavery

A version of this piece was first published today in the Wall Street Journal as "Self-Delusion." (Free link this week, but subscription from the next.) It was written a couple of weeks back, and has its genesis in this post of mine.

Organized slavery ended decades ago, but to go by the criticism of some leftist commentators in India, one would imagine that it is alive and flourishing in the world's largest democracy.

Recently it has become especially fashionable to hit out at call centers, or business processing outsourcing (BPO) units as they are officially known. A study published by an institute that comes under India's Labor Ministry compared conditions in Indian BPO outfits with those of "Roman slave ships." Chetan Bhagat, the author of a new book set in one such unit, "One Night @ The Call Center," recently claimed that call centers are "corroding a generation." It is common, almost clichéd, to hear call-center workers referred to as "cyber-coolies."

All this criticism is terribly misguided. Contrary to being a form of economic imperialism, as its critics claim, India's BPO industry is an indication of what is possible for a country to achieve with free markets. India's call centers make use of one of its comparative advantages -- cheap, English-speaking labor. More importantly, it empowers the estimated 350,000 people who work in this industry, instead of "stripping them of their dignity," as a common canard goes.

The people who work in these call centers -- indeed, in any company in India -- do so out of choice, not coercion. They make that choice on the basis of the options available to them, options which are now far wider than they were a decade ago. When this writer was in college in the early 1990s, it was next to impossible for a young graduate to get a job on the basis of his degree alone.

Today, a working knowledge of English suffices. In the socialist decades after independence a middle-class man could save up enough to buy a house and a car only when he was in his 30s, or even 40s. Today, young people in their 20s can do so. Many of them use their time in the BPO industry to better their lives substantially. Some support families, others save up to go abroad for further education. Some simply make money, a goal apparently anathema to grizzled socialists.

Why, then, the criticism? One of the natural consequences of socialism is that a few stand in judgment of many, and make their choices for them. As India has moved away from the Fabian socialism it embraced on achieving independence in 1947, more and more people have been empowered by an ever-widening array of choices. Socialists in India have seen the Soviet Union collapse, the Berlin Wall fall, and India begin to liberalize. Their beliefs have traditionally been strengthened by what behavioral psychologists call the confirmation bias – accepting only the evidence that seems to support their worldview. Alas, such evidence has been vastly diminished in the last two decades. So they resort to reflexively lashing out at anything related to free markets.

India's leftist "intellectuals," and those who aspire to fill their shoes, view the world through a utopia-tinted lens, a utopia that is entirely their own construction. When they examine their own policies, they do so on the basis of the ideal world they are meant to result in, and not the mess they create in the real world. And when they criticize the choices people make in the real world, they do so on the basis of the choices they would have in this utopian socialist paradise.

These "intellectuals" do not condescend just to BPO workers, but to all those Indians whose aspirations are not aligned with theirs and who, typically, have more choices available to them because of free markets. To them, shopping malls are bad because they turn people into consumerist buying machines. They disparage the large number of television channels as being filled with Western junk, ludicrously proclaiming that the one state-owned channel India had two decades ago was better. They do not accept that increased choices are a sign of progress, and condemn the way other people choose to live their lives, insulting them by denigrating their choices.

But times are changing, and such self-righteousness is increasingly being exposed for the self-delusion that it is.